All posts.
Every EasySpawn article, newest first — deploying AI-built apps, Claude Code, databases, security, and the infrastructure underneath.
217 posts · page 4 of 9
SEO Basics for Your App: How to Get Found on Google
A beautiful app that search engines can't read is invisible. The fundamentals that matter for a small app or product site — titles and descriptions, crawlable pages, a sitemap, speed, and link previews — plus the single-page-app problem that hides many AI-built sites from Google.
How to Send Email From Your App Without Landing in Spam
Password resets, receipts, and sign-up confirmations that land in spam — or never arrive — are one of the most common launch-week problems. What SPF, DKIM, and DMARC actually do, how to set them up for your domain, and why your app should never send mail itself.
Semantic Versioning Explained: What 2.4.1 Actually Means
Version numbers like 2.4.1 follow a convention: major.minor.patch. What each number promises, what ^ and ~ mean in package.json, why '0.x' versions are different, how lock files fit in, and how to version your own app or library.
Self-Hosted Cloud IDEs in 2026: code-server, Coder, and What Running One Really Takes
You can run VS Code in a browser on your own server in ten minutes. Running it well — for a team, securely, with backups — is a different project. An honest map of the self-hosted options, from a single code-server to Coder and Eclipse Che, and the work each one hands you.
Self-Hosting Next.js Without Vercel: What Works, What Breaks, What to Configure
Next.js runs anywhere Node.js does, and on a single server almost everything just works. The surprises: build-time environment variables, caching across instances, streaming behind a proxy, and a few Vercel-only conveniences. A practical guide to running Next.js on your own infrastructure.
Securing MCP Servers: Threats and Controls for Tool-Connected Agents
An MCP server turns a model's text into real actions against real systems. The threat model — tool poisoning, prompt injection via tool output, confused deputies, token passthrough, DNS rebinding on local servers, over-broad scopes — and the controls for building and deploying MCP servers safely.
Secrets Management Beyond .env Files
.env files are fine on a laptop and fragile everywhere else. Where secrets should live in production and CI, secret managers vs platform env vars, OIDC to remove long-lived CI credentials, rotation, least privilege, keeping secrets out of logs and AI agent context, and a practical maturity path.
How to Run AI-Generated Code Safely
AI-generated code is usually well-intentioned and occasionally destructive, and the packages it installs are a supply-chain risk of their own. A practical, layered approach — what the code can see, reach, consume, and outlive — with a hardened Docker command you can use today.
How to Run Claude Code on a Remote Server (and Keep It Running)
Running Claude Code on a server instead of your laptop means sessions survive a closed lid, a dropped connection, and a flat battery. A practical setup guide — the server, the session, the security — and what you take on by doing it yourself.
Rootless Containers and User Namespaces: What They Actually Protect
Root in a container is root on the host unless something remaps it. How user namespaces work, subuid/subgid ranges, Docker userns-remap vs rootless mode vs Podman, Kubernetes hostUsers: false, the file-ownership and networking costs, and where rootless fits.
How to Review a Pull Request Written by an AI Agent
AI-written pull requests are tidy, confident, and plausible — which makes them harder to review, not easier. The failure modes that differ from human code, the order to read a PR in, and a checklist that catches what skimming misses.
Reverse Proxies Explained: Nginx, Caddy, and Traefik in Front of Your App
A reverse proxy sits between the internet and your app, handling TLS, routing, compression, and more. What reverse proxies do, how Nginx, Caddy, and Traefik differ, forwarded headers and trusting the real client IP, WebSockets and streaming, timeouts and body limits, and common 502/504 causes.
How to Resume a Claude Code Session (and What Resuming Can't Bring Back)
claude --continue and claude --resume reopen yesterday's conversation in seconds. But a resumed session restores the conversation, not the world it was working in. The commands, the habits that make resuming reliable, and the gap between conversation state and environment state.
Designing a REST API That Won't Embarrass You Later
APIs are hard to change once clients depend on them. The conventions that keep a REST API predictable — resource naming, methods, status codes, errors, pagination, validation, idempotency, and versioning — with the specific mistakes AI-generated APIs tend to make.
Why Does My App Look Broken on My Phone? Responsive Design Basics
It looks perfect on your laptop and falls apart on a phone: text too small, buttons off the edge, a page that scrolls sideways. What responsive design is, the five most common causes of broken mobile layouts, how to test properly, and what to ask your AI tool.
Replit Alternatives in 2026: What to Use Depending on Why You're Leaving
Replit bundles an AI agent, an editor, hosting, and a database. People leave for different reasons — cost, control, the agent, or outgrowing the platform — and each reason points to a different alternative. An honest guide to picking the right one.
Regular Expressions for Beginners: Reading Regex Without Panic
^[\w.+-]+@\w+\.\w{2,}$ looks like a cat walked on the keyboard. It's a regular expression, and AI tools write them constantly. The dozen symbols that cover most regex, how to read one piece by piece, how to test them, and when not to use regex at all.
Refactoring AI-Generated Code: Cleaning Up Without Breaking Things
Refactoring improves code's structure without changing what it does. When to refactor an AI-built app, how to do it safely with tests and small steps, the most valuable clean-ups, and prompts that stop the AI from rewriting everything.
Redis: When a Small App Actually Needs It (and When Postgres Is Enough)
Redis shows up in every architecture diagram, and AI tools add it by reflex. It's excellent at a few specific jobs — caching, rate limiting, ephemeral state, pub/sub — and unnecessary for many small apps. What it's for, what it isn't, and how to use it without losing data you cared about.
Prompt Injection in Coding Agents: A Threat Model
A coding agent with a shell, credentials, and network access reads text written by strangers all day. A threat model — sources, capabilities, sinks — why detection-based defences fail, and the architectural controls that actually bound the damage.
Writing a Production Dockerfile for a Node.js App
The Dockerfile an AI tool writes usually works — and ships a 1.5 GB image running as root that ignores shutdown signals and leaks build secrets into its layers. A line-by-line production Dockerfile: multi-stage builds, layer caching, non-root users, signal handling, secrets, and health checks.
Preview Environments for Every Branch: How They Work and What They Cost
A preview environment gives every branch or pull request its own live URL, so changes are reviewed running rather than read as diffs. How they work, the hard part (databases), the ways to get one, and why they matter more when an AI agent is writing the code.
Direct-to-Storage Uploads With Presigned URLs
Proxying uploads through your server wastes memory, bandwidth, and request time. How presigned URLs let browsers upload straight to S3, R2, or GCS: PUT vs POST policies, enforcing size and type, bucket CORS, confirming uploads, multipart, and serving private files.
Postgres as a Job Queue: FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED Done Properly
You may not need Redis or a broker for background jobs. How SKIP LOCKED makes Postgres a safe concurrent queue: claim/lease/ack, visibility timeouts and crash recovery, retries with backoff, LISTEN/NOTIFY, transactional enqueue, indexing, bloat, and its limits.